SUPERNATURAL
“Stepping into an open territory. A place of peace to start a collective exchange - as they are so necessary today. To reinvest our relationship with the world. To our environment. This is the simple proposal that we have set ourselves to offer to people who wish to take part into it. ”
- Amaury Bouquet about Supernatural performance at Eye Square, Berlin 2021
Nature, music & well-being
Supernatural is an educational and artistic project designed to create workshops to discover nature in a playful way through the music of plants.
As a multidisciplinary project it combines performance with plant music and installation art to create a healing and inspiring experience.
Its aim is to shine a light on living things so that we can learn to take care of ourselves, others and the Earth through music and ecology.
About
SUPERNATURAL began in 2021 as a collaboration between French artists Amaury Bouquet (visual art and participatory performance) and Alex Alexopoulos aka Wild Anima (sound and installation) as an outgrowth of the concept album of the same name released that year.
It's a project that highlights the therapeutic aspect that exists between human beings and trees through the idea of recognising how nature inspires us to find the inner light that allows us to repair the broken parts in ourselves through a form of internal photosynthesis. Through experiments and participatory installations we have tried to blend the worlds of immersive concert and experiential art inspired by tarot, mythology and the therapeutic practices of ancient Greece.
This project is developed as part of an artistic reflection on the 'ecology of emotions'. A philosophical study of the heart organ as a sixth sense and its relationship with the Earth as a whole.
We draw our inspiration from plants, trees and the natural world through plant music.
The basic idea is that, just as we think of ecology as the practice of caring for the environment, we can also apply this practice to our own inner grounds and emotional well-being in order to build a more sustainable society in harmony with nature.
SUPERNATURAL is thought of as an ever evolving collective of artists - current collaborators are the plant music sound project Masterplants Orchestra and French art collective BIMBIM .
We like to think of Supernatural as a shapeshifting living organism adapting to the various terrains and people it encounters.
Its current formats include an immersive art concert as well as pop up installations inviting participants on a journey through sound, light and energy.
Educational workshops
Learn about plants in a fun way and highlight awareness of the natural world in interaction through music.
Music & Ecology workshops
I offer music and ecology workshops for children and teenagers using a small device receiver, which transforms the bio-electricity of plants into music. Using sensors, the plants' energy flows are transformed into digital signals that launch sounds created by humans (sound designers). Thanks to this tool, we can listen to the plant playing music and see in real time how the plant world's state of consciousness changes according to the environment in which it finds itself.
What is plantmusic?
Plant music is a technological process that uses a box fitted with sensors to measure the plants' bio-electricity and transform it into music. In this way, changes in the plant's energy flow are translated into musical notes. In a way, the plant plays music!
With this tool, we can observe that each plant has its own melody and reacts differently to its environment. This enables children to become aware of the living nature of plants and to create a form of dialogue with them.
Earth Mandala at Supernatural installation, ILALI studio, Berlin 2021
Supernatural at ILALI studio, Berlin 2021 - Wild Anima and Masterplants Orchestra (Tritone Crisantemo) plant-music live concert
Supernatural concert at Eye Square, Berlin 2021, credit Tom Klingbeil
Art experience, installation & live music
This multidisciplinary project combines performance with plant music and installation art to create a healing and inspiring experience. We like to think of Supernatural as a shapeshifting living organism adapting to the various terrains and people it encounters.
Its current formats include an immersive art concert as well as pop up installations inviting participants on a journey through sound, light and energy.
SUPERNATURAL is thought of as an ever evolving collective of artists - current collaborators are the plant music sound project Masterplants Orchestra and French art collective BIMBIM .
The experience
SUPERNATURAL is an immersive art concert taking participants into an inner odyssey with ambient electronic sounds, plant music and songs inspired by nature. Through innovative ways to experience live music we aim to give a sense of unity between the natural world and human beings.
The performance is hosted into an inner forest - a soft space created with large scale plant paper cuts of fragility and an intimate atmosphere.
Guided by a participatory collective tarot reading, inspired by elements of nature: “Naturomancie”, the audience is invited to dive into a journey of self discovery through storytelling inspired by Greek mythology and Jungian psychology. Where the underworld is brought as a metaphor of the subconscious and the performance space becomes a place of introspection and healing.
The installation
Supernatural installation is thought of as a soft space with large-size silhouettes of wild flora paper cut-outs and lights to create an calming atmosphere of intimacy. This installation is thought of as ever-evolving and takes various shapes depending on its location and occasion.
By magnifying the aliveness in plants, we aim to give a sense of unity between plants and human beings. Supernatural is an attempt to connect with the flora in a sensitive and creative way, possibly bringing ourselves in a place where boundaries between kingdoms melt.
We are open to interact with various spaces and projects, feel free to contact us if you’d like to collaborate with us or host our installation for your events.
Contact:
wildanimamusic@gmail.com
Naturomancie
Naturomancie is a collective tarot experience created by Amaury Bouquet with a tarot deck in A3 format with ten cards representing our ecosystem from the micro (the molecule) to the macro (the solar system). The experience invites participants to share their stories, dance and reflect on a specific question that they formulated altogether. At the end of the experience different groups are invited to created their own artwork of tarot card. See below the current artworks made by past participants.
Naturomancie artworks (made by the participants)
Supernatural - Naturomancy tarot at Eye Square, Berlin 2021 - credit Gino Kwon
Supernatural at Unifying Gate Festival, Berlin 2021 - Amaury Bouquet performing “Naturomancy” tarot experience - credit Gino Kwon
About the artists
Wild Anima - Alex Hélène Alexopoulos
I'm a French artist of Greek origin, my artist name is Wild Anima which can be translated as the wild soul. I've been creating ethereal ambient music for over 10 years, I've lived in Berlin for the last five years and have just moved to Marseille, inspired by my origins and the Mediterranean basin in general. My creations are inspired by Greco-Roman and Celtic mythology, nature and the psyche.
In 2018 I did an artistic residency in the Fish Factory centre in Iceland and that's when I started my artistic and philosophical work around the Earth and the ecology of emotions. Through my personal field experiences with the natural world as well as my own life experiences I have developed a deep connection to the heart, all its organic faculties such as cardiac cognition through the electromagnetic field and its profound relationship to our planet. I had an intimate experience of the living nature of the planet and its super-consciousness, as described by the late researcher Stephen Harrod Buhner in his books "The Secret Teachings of Plants: the intelligence of the heart through the direct perception of nature" and "Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realms: into the dreaming of Earth", which were a great inspiration to me.
My most recent project is a compilation of meditative music created at the request of the research centre The HeartMath Institute for their new wellness application "Inner Balance - coherence plus".
HeartMath Institute: https://www.heartmath.org/
Press article
“Wild Anima about Mantras, Healing and the Heart as an Oscillator “on 15 questions interview
Podcast interview
I am an artist with a passion for social engagement and creative collaboration. As an artist, I create illustrations, watercolors, paper cuts, masks and murals that play with the forms and meanings of symbols. Both mediums, pictorial symbolism or symbolic actions are representations of our collective psyche and each individual history. My work encompasses the joyful transgression of public space through murals, bringing back elements of nature into the urban landscapes, to the creation of participatory art experiences. I am also the co-founder of the interdisciplinary collective BIMBIM.
Other collaborators
Masterplants is a plant music art project started in Dhamanur, Italy lead by Tritone Crisantemo who describes it as an interspecies art collective bringing about musical reconnection with the plant world. The purpose of the band is to show that humankind can create beauty in a world of inter-creation with the miracle that is nature herself.
BIMBIM creates introspective art-experiences—immersive, participatory and playful artistic environments that invite and encourage the exploration of our inner selves!
The art-experience is an emerging art form. Rather than engage with art through the traditional perspective of the viewer, we invite our audiences to step into and journey through active, creative spaces as participants. Our art-experiences bring multiple artistic, social and spiritual practices together.
They evoke not only individual observation and reflection, but also communal exchange and play through encouraged interaction with others. In this commitment to both individual and group exploration, we guide participants into deeper connection with themselves, with each other, and with the world around us.
BIMBIM believes that we, as individuals, are here to learn together, and that the art-experience can serve as a powerful tool in this process. Our goal is to playfully bring about reflection and self-exploration, and in doing so, kindle self-awareness in people’s lives.
As we connect to and listen to our inner selves, we experience a deeper understanding of life. We allow the beauty of the universe to unfold, and we begin to access truer happiness, depth and love!